


Every Growing Thing

by wisdomeagle



Category: Firefly
Genre: Angst, Botanical Metaphors, Community: femslash07, Complicated Relationships, F/F, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-01
Updated: 2015-09-01
Packaged: 2018-04-18 12:03:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4705343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wisdomeagle/pseuds/wisdomeagle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is heart-weeding. (Not a happy story.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Growing Thing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Trialia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trialia/gifts).



Kaylee, like every green and growing thing, rises, twisting, to the light, and in the bright curved secret of River's twisted smile, she blossoms like the first springtime on a desert planet.

River, like every creeping growing thing, grows ably over every surface of Kaylee's skin. She is cancer. Tight in a ball on the foot of Kaylee's bed, she is voluminous, and every book unfolds another chapter, every chapter another page, and every page, a leaf that flutters, falls, and breaks the smooth expanse of Kaylee's joy.

"Why don't you love me?" She thinks she says the words aloud, but they echo in her brain so she can't hear them in Kaylee's, or in Kaylee's whisper, or in the falling curve of Kaylee's lips that can swallow a kiss as easily as air but haven't learned to parse disappointment.

"I do love," tries Kaylee, and the sentence grows inside her like a parasite, then bursts the surface, shedding pollen and false promises over River's solitude. 

"I don't need your tears." River looks away and can't hear Kaylee cry, which is worse. Every sound is the shredding of her own heart.

Kaylee bounced, bounded, twirled through River's life, curved like vines around her heart, blossomed kisses down her spine, learned every centimeter of her skin, caused her climax with rough hands and could make her shudder with touches so tender they were hardly real at all.

And River, like a cancer, filled Kaylee's every cell, methodically, changing her from Kaylee into someone else -- a lover. She sat in the engine room, waiting, silent as the throbbing of Serenity's heart, until Kaylee saw her and startled before she smiled. Then River smiled too, and won that game. But there were others, games a little like wrestling that lasted past the time when Jayne saw them and with a sneer asked "Ain't you grafted to each other yet?", games of jacks when the ball flew higher than River on tip-toes could reach, and the silent game of dress-up that ended when River, naked, kissed clothed Kaylee, broke through her skin and completely devoured.

River shuts her eyes to those memories and feels only the hollow that Kaylee can't feed. Maybe things are different in the core, where folks are proper. Maybe on Osiris, they still marry and give in marriage, but here on the rim, life's lived more ragged. She doesn't think a white dress will solve anything, really, except it will bind them tighter, save her from the vagaries of another girl's heart. But she's stuck now with the constant thudding, the unthinking eagerness, of Kaylee's want. Even if she runs. Worse if she runs. Worse if she crawls, if she tries, because when evasion fails, and it will, she'll be stirruped and sedated and when she wakes, there'll be Kaylee (always, always), blinking tearily, holding her hand, whispering words that have no meaning except to entwine, entangle, and seduce.

Kaylee glows and doesn't care, doesn't imagine that anyone, seeing her, won't glow or want to, too. Kaylee can't imagine being trapped, Kaylee, who came from dust and emerged radiant, sterling and perfect even when she's greased with engine and sex, Kaylee, unalloyed even when her hand is halfway inside River and her breath's shaking with the pace of River's fingers. Kaylee will never belong to anyone. Kaylee can call her mind her own.

No one spots her, shaking. No one says, "Mei-mei, what's wrong?" and pulls her tightly into a hug. No one, not even her brother, thinks to look tonight. They're busy flying and falling, and Serenity is cold to touch. "Come find me," she whispers. She is a seedpod, tossed carelessly into a light breeze. Make a wish, blow me away; when I return in full bloom your wish will come back, true. Kaylee knows a thousand stars and wishes all of them into emptiness with the light breath of laughter.

They might reunite. Kaylee might knock on the door, she might call, "Come in if you must," full of irony and disdain, and Kaylee might kiss her till everything peels away except the twining of that kiss, the slick, wet, groping movement of tongues. Or again, they might fall away; she might nod solemnly at Kaylee over dinner and pretend not to see the flecks of tears in Kaylee's eyes the second before she kicks her chair back and escapes to the privacy of her own quarters to sob. Again (in every iteration), she might uproot herself from madness, fling herself into Kaylee's bed and linger like seduction until Kaylee finds her and wraps her in warm smiles. Or again. Or again. Or again.

She's going deeper under, fungal, feral. She feels the tendrils tying her to Kaylee untwine: the whispered words, the tight braids they made of each other's hair, the eyelash Kaylee plucked from River's cheek as if it were a tear. It's cozy and decayed inside her brain, where mutilated secrets lie in severed amygdala, where armchair warriors made her their sharpest weapon and where Kaylee practiced poetry, inscribing herself in River's neurons. A woman could be comfortable here, lying on a mat of moss and feeding on the rotten remnants of her once-whole romance.

Kaylee, like every green and growing thing, will wilt. At first she'll smile, still, seeing River, and will whisper her name; her happiness will fade before her smile does, and then red will fade to pink will fade to white and she will know. She'll scream; River knows it. She deserves to. Kaylee built a house on sand, put roots down in rocky soil, fed herself on fetid, cancerous growth, and now the lover River made is dying.

She rocks back and forth, flips the pages faster, faster, oiled with her own terror, searching for the happy ending or at least the less tragic one, where she is whole and smiling, a winter rose in full bloom with Kaylee's plump arm around her waist, where she is stern and tired, ferny and too busy with her brain-work for Kaylee's simpler desires, where she is anywoman else, grown old, or lean, or even tired, anything but sharp, pungent, needy and keening and dripping wet with (Kaylee's) gorram tears.


End file.
